The New York City Council voted Thursday to override Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s vetoes on two bills that are designed to rein in the New York Police Department’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy, marking yet another blow to the mayor in the waning days of his tenure at City Hall.

Stopping and searching without compelling probable cause needs to stop. If that means hiring more police or using smarter and less invasive tactics, then so be it. Police can’t keep humiliating innocent people and targeting the “wrong” racial groups, which effectively criminalizes Blacks and Hispanics.

2 Responses to victory against stop and frisk

I was a cop in NYC. Your comment of targeting either Hispanic or Blacks exclusively is not presented accurately as the majority of crime, is within communities that are predominantly Black or Hispanic. They are also the same racial composition that accounts for 97% of victims of shootings or as a subject involved in a shooting and having received lethal wounds (I’m pro-2A so I would rather state it like that).
People have their own ideas and thoughts. I worked a ghetto and saw the resulting hardships of what the Stop & Frisk is intended to do. While pro-2A, let me say that I do not want criminals armed. No way in hell. The city will, experience a rise in crime.
Sorry that my un-smart street manner may have insulted a few back in the 20th Century, but I rarely was ever wrong on the street. Stop & Frisk, reduced crime, and saved lives.
Now the liberal crybabies can go pick up their dead, because crime will spread to nicer target rich non-ghettos.

Good points Brittius. I don’t want criminals armed with guns either. Official statistics do indeed suggest a far higher level of criminal activity in certain racial groups. This is a complex subject with few easy answers. To give a simple example, many college students try pot and other illicit substances, and yet aggressive tactics on college campuses are uncommon. If instead of college campus, we imagine the same drug activity in “the ghetto,” the likelihood of aggressive and visible police response is greatly increased.

This isn’t about liberalism or conservatism though. Local police tactics don’t appreciably change based on politics at the highest levels. There are many factors that go into crime, and “handicapping” police regarding stop and frisk might force less invasive but still effective tactics to be employed. Further, we don’t want a system where minorities feel targeted. Time and time again, evidence suggests that they then become alienated, feeling as though they’re “criminals” no matter what they do, and then they become the very real criminal that society “expects of them.” We need to think smarter about ways to avoid this cycle.

The problem is often narrowly described in economic, sociological, political, or psychological terms, whereas I espouse thinking of the issue holistically, in all of the aforementioned ways combined.